FBI Decryption Failed

It was interesting to read this article recently which shows how strong current encryption technology is. The FBI and other organisations were apparently unable guess or crack the pre-boot passwords of criminal’s hard drives using a technique known as a dictionary attack. As it’s name suggests, a dictionary attack uses a combination of known words to attempt to guess the password. This is opposed to a brute force approach which would start from one series of characters and continue in a sequence to guess possible combinations.

It is worth remembering that if you are going to encrypt your hard drive that even the FBI can’t access your data if you forget the password. Also if the bootable part of your hard drive becomes unstable, it can be almost impossible to gain access to your data, even with the password. Make sure you test out your disaster recovery process on an encrypted drive, before you trust your crucial data to it. And also make backups somewhere that can be accessed quickly if required. Some large drives can take a day to decrypt even if they are fully functional.

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Advice

Stop using the hard drive as soon as possible. If the problem is getting worse then you may eventually lose access completely.

Don't download ANYTHING to the disk. It could write over the files you're trying to recover.

Don't try to scan, repair or fix any errors unless you have backups of the data. A failed repair process can damage the files beyond recovery.

Don't re-install or restore the computer unless you have backups of the data already. It may get the machine running again, but only in a factory-fresh way. Your data will be lost.

If you manage to access your files at any point, make a copy to another drive as soon as you can. It may be a fluke, and could be the last time you see the files. Don't reboot expecting to see them again.

If the files you need are really important then you should consider getting the disk professionally recovered. We've spent years making our process as safe as possible to maximise our chances of success.

If you decide to try your own recovery, keep a close watch on the time estimates. If the time keeps incrementing up it could be a sign of disk trouble. Failure to deal with that could cause the drive to fail completely, and beyond repair. A hard drive shouldn't take longer than a few hours to extract.